St. Joseph County to spend $11 million on Gumwood Road

SOUTH BEND Â? County Commissioner Steve Ross is questioning why a two-mile stretch of Gumwood Road will cost almost $11 million to rebuild, including $425,832 for engineering alone.

Susan Al-Abbas, the county engineer, defends the project, saying it is needed to handle the increased traffic on Gumwood. The latest traffic study, she said, indicates Gumwood is handling 10,000 vehicles a day.

The conflict is part of RossÂ? ongoing unhappiness with the way county road money is divvied up among the three commissioner districts.

Ross views everything in terms on his own 2nd District, Dobson said, and not in terms of the county as a whole.

This year, the 2nd District received only about $240,000 from the wheel tax allocation for road projects, while DobsonÂ?s district received about $1.1 million. The 3rd District, represented by Democrat Cindy Bodle, got about $1 million.

The Gumwood Road project actually has been on the drawing board since at least 2000, Al-Abbas said. Planning started and a design contract was let that year, she said, but lack of funding stalled the project.

The funding is secured now, and the plan has changed.

ThatÂ?s where the increased costs for engineering came in.

The original fee for the preliminary design was $216,000, but the figure now has mushroomed to $425,932.

Â?On the basis of this alone, the county engineer should resign,Â? Ross said.

Al-Abbas explains the higher figure by saying the new design is more complicated than the original plan.

Gumwood will be expanded to three or more lanes from Indiana 23 to Adams Road, she said, with a middle-turn lane in some places and left-turn lanes in some places.

Perhaps most significantly, she said, the new plan calls for roundabouts at GumwoodÂ?s intersections with Brick and Adams roads.

The construction costs will be $9.6 million, and 80 percent of that (about $7.7 million) will come from federal dollars, Al-Abbas said. The remaining 20 percent (some $1.9 million) will be from the wheel tax and the fuel surtax.

Design costs, right of way plans, purchase of property and other incidentals will amount to about $1.2 million, Al-Abbas said.

The work will be done in phases over the next several years.

Mishawaka is handling the southernmost part, roughly from Indiana 23 to the city limits. It annexed that land to accommodate a shopping center being built northeast of the Gumwood/Indiana 23 intersection.

The Mishawaka work is adding a southbound lane, a northbound lane, a center lane for left turns and a right-turn lane into the shopping center. The work is under way and is projected to be done by the end of October.

Other changes, including additional turn lanes, are planned next year at the Indiana 23/Gumwood Road intersection, as part of the stateÂ?s plans to widen the highway.

The rest of the county project will be done in two phases, Al-Abbas said.